Want to improve your writing? Here’s some tips on how to write a review from Mark Kermode, creative writing from Stephen King and general good advice from George Orwell.

Mark Kermode has this to say on the five essential ingredients of a proper film review (though I think they apply to all reviews) in his book The Good, The Bad & The Multiplex…

Opinion, description, contextualisation, analysis and entertainment.

1. Opinion

Saw 3D is rubbish.

2. Opinion and description

Saw 3D is a horror film that is rubbish.

3. Opinion, description and contextualisation

Saw 3D is the seventh episode and the first stereoscopic instalment in a long-running horror series, and it is rubbish.

4. Opinion, description, contextualisation and analysis

Saw 3D is the first instalment in a series that began life as a tortuously inventive low-budget chiller but which has descended over the course of six sequels into gory, boring torture porn which is rubbish.

It took the once-inventive but increasingly depressing Saw series seven movies to resort to the hackneyed headache of 3-D, but despite the promise that this is ‘The Final Chapter’ (just wait till the sums say otherwise) you keep wishing those protruding spikes would leap a little further out of the screen and puncture your eyeballs to ensure that you never have to watch rubbish like this ever again.